DH Tools

John Ladd, 16 May 2024

jrladd.com/slides/dh-tools 🛠️🛠️🛠️

About me

Zoe LeBlanc

Assistant Professor, School of Information Sciences, UIUC
zoeleblanc.com

Today’s Presentation

  1. A (short) long history of DH Tools
  2. Representative examples
  3. Building Network Navigator

What Is a Tool?

The questions of ‘who is digital humanities?’ and ‘how is digital humanities?’ can evidently be reframed as questions like ‘what are the design goals of our tools?’, ‘when should a tool “just work”?’, and ‘are we tool users, tool builders, or tool theorists?’

Julia Flanders, “Jobs, Roles, and Tools in the Digital Humanities”, 2023

Every humanist uses digital tools.

The false dichotomy of “Hack vs. Yack”

DH Tools?

  • GUI Applications
  • Code libraries
  • Programming Languages
  • Statistics & Models
  • Corpora
  • AI Chatbots
  • Computers

Eternal September

User-friendliness

The Killer App

Some Illustrative Examples

TAPoR 3

Voyant

The Distant Viewing Toolkit

RStudio

Zotero & Omeka

Building a Tool for Network Analysis

Gephi

Palladio

Six Degrees of Francis Bacon

Network Navigator 1.0

Palladio with metrics

Critical Making

Network Navigator 2.0

networknavigator.jrladd.com

Network Navigator 2.0

Who Is Digital Humanities?

What counts as scholarship?

What’s next?

Thank you!

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